Top 10 search terms that lead to my blog

Simplicity. So essential, yet so elusive. Why? How can something so simple prove so difficult to grasp?

Today’s Google image (they really should pay me for all the free publicity) is this:

That’s Laura Ingalls and her sister Mary from Little House on the Prairie. Little House appeals as a slice of a simpler time, at least simpler in certain ways. People back then didn’t have to deal with car insurance. Or global warming. Or the falling ruble. On the other hand, if you were catching junebugs down by the creek and happened to skin your knee…yeah. Death.

Truth be told: this is my favorite sister.

Truth be told: this is my favorite sister.

The show always makes me think of my sisters, of the three of us being young and having simpler senses of everything. I still remember how mind-blowing it was when the cable remote had like 30 channels. Now my TV guide goes up to channel 1997. And I don’t watch at least 1990 of those channels.

The last couple of weeks have been one of those stretches in life where I haven’t cared about anything. To be more truthful, I haven’t cared about myself. Not a whit. It’s weird, whenever this disassociation hits. It’s always going to be there, I know. It’s a lifelong energy. The feeling doesn’t change, but its color does, in relation to larger life contexts. Such as age. I’m 36. Not caring about myself at 36 feels different than it did when I was younger. It feels like a wrong turn, one I can’t afford to be making at this stage of my journey.

So I’m trying to focus on simplicity. In that spirit, this blog is simply a list of my 10 favorite search terms that have led various intrepid internet interlocutors to Blues of Nine. These are all real.

10. “Turning 30 sucks”

Poor baby.

I’m a 36-year old adjunct professor whose student loan debt is larger than most countries’ GDP. I may never have a family. I may never own a home; I may be renting apartments until the day I die in one. Nice to be reminded that somewhere out there, some myopic soul’s stressing about turning THIRTY. You think turning 30 sucks? You know what 36 feels like? Like you’re one of those shopping carts with the wheel that doesn’t work. If one of those shopping carts also had a ton of student loan debt.

9. “Color Me Bad 2013”

Three things stand out about this search term ever being typed, anywhere on Earth, ever:

A) Who cares enough about Color Me Badd that at some point during their life they look them up…yet they don’t care enough to notice it’s “Badd” with two D’s?

B) Who is googling Color Me Badd in 2013?

C) WHO IS GOOGLING COLOR ME BADD, PERIOD?

It doesn’t matter to me what the answer is. Whoever you are, CMB googler, I just need you to do one thing for me. Choose.

8. 27 variations of “Why did Robin Williams kill himself”

I’ve no idea why Robin Williams killed himself. Suicide is personal, and often stigmatized, and I don’t want to minimize its impact on the survivors or the person who chose that path. I cannot pretend to have any idea why Robin Williams killed himself. But I imagine that there were at least a handful of social realities he disdained. And I imagine whatever led dozens of people to my blog entry about news choppers loitering over his house after he was gone is somewhat related to these disdained realities.

7. “Everybody poops it’s not pleasant”

I’m not sure what the logic behinds this search is. Does it imply the fact that everyone poops is unpleasant? Or does it suggest we’re all secretly suffering while pooping? It’s poor writing. Step your scatalogical speculation game up, googlers.

Related story: a few weeks ago, there was a big snowstorm here. It was forecast for days. People cleared out the supermarkets like Melancholia was happening. I had three days of work canceled. It was very much “Stay home, close your door, and don’t think you’re going anywhere for a while.”
Right as the storm was starting to wallop, I had to run out to the pharmacy. For the first time in like 20 years, I was constipated. It’s been so long since I was, I didn’t even realize at first that’s what was happening. Usually my butt’s punctuality would make Mussolini’s trains envious. No fuss, no muss. But this morning, I had a strange pain in my lower abdomen, and I could not for the life of me deliver my brown baby. Now, my butt was insistent that it had a package for me, but it just. Wasn’t. Happening.
The abdominal pain was getting worse and worse. Eventually, I felt like if I didn’t poop, my butt was going to explode, but if I did poop, my lower abdomen was going to burst. I pictured kidney stones; I pictured gall stones (if you didn’t know by now, I have no concept of biology or physiology).
I ran to the pharmacy and found the laxative shelf, which was distressingly voluminous with options. A tip for all you shelf-stockers out there: the laxative demographic, to a higher extent than almost all other shoppers, is made up of urgent shoppers. This is not a group that has the luxury of time to compare powders versus pills. Why, God, why are some laxatives labeled “gentle” while others aren’t? It’s an interesting philosophical question to consider – what is a non-gentle laxative, and how has such a deeply-flawed product survived consumer evolution this late into late-stage capitalism? Again, though – these questions are not something you need when you feel like you’re giving birth to twins who intend to make separate entrances out the front and back of your midsection.

As for the end-game: I bought a powder laxative. I could barely walk, and standing upright was out of the question; I was moving around like a cro-magnon. Guzzled it down like Andy Capp on a bender. Seconds later……the sweetest, sweetest relief. The way I felt after that poop is probably the last thing I’ll remember on my deathbed.

6. “Miranda Valentine porn star/my Valentine snatch”

I wrote a piece last year about one of the more interesting Valentine’s Day traditions, from Norfolk in England. Totally unrelatedly, it turns out there’s a porn star named Miranda Valentine (of course there is). Turns out there’re a lot of lonely people out there combining “Valentine’s Day” and “snatch” in their searches. This is more obvious than there being a porn star named Miranda Valentine. Let’s move on.

5. “Mark Eaton next to short guy”

I write a lot about basketball, almost always concerning the Knicks. Yet Mark Eaton, who played for the Utah Jazz 30+ years ago, turns up in more searches connecting to my page than any other player. The comedy of this search is that Mark Eaton was 7 feet, 4 inches tall. Writing “next to short guy” after “Mark Eaton” is redundant to the max. Check out the pic below. See the little dude trying to shoot with Eaton hovering above him?

I wrote a piece last year about how NBA owners – billionaires – are so sickeningly successful in spinning public opinion against the players – the millionaires – whenever there’s a financial dispute between them. This pic appears in that piece:

Two points of note:

A) The name of this picture file – and this is not my name; it’s its name – is “Romney-Bain Capital-Moneyshot.” Somewhere there’s a doctorate thesis waiting to be written on the juxtaposition of Miranda Valentine’s porn-ness and Mitt Romney’s moneyshot porn-ness (and this post’s still got one more porn star left!).

B) “White man money cigar” existing as a search term in 2015 is as sure a sign as any that we still got a long way to go to overcome.

3. “Signs of poor brain”

If this isn’t a ringing endorsement of one’s writings and one’s readers, really, what is?

2. “Show me old black man fucking a football player”

I will not.

And, number one because it’s not even close how much more often this search leads people here than all other searches COMBINED:

1. “Belle Knox”

In good writing, there is symmetry between your intro and your conclusion. In life, I trust the universe to unfold as it must. So something made it inevitable that a list that opened with a search term that brings to mind my duality as an educated indentured servant ends with one about a girl I made passing reference to once, one whose intellect earned her a spot at one of the most prestigious universities in the country, only to conclude the only reasonably possible way to afford that spot was to go into porn. Symmetry, thy name is simplicity. Now she’s debt-free and getting as many views in one day as my blog’s gotten in a year and a half.